Regular expressions are much power and significant and may be
counted as one more programming language. Regular expressions may be much useful
in application servers which check user unput, inputs data from external data
sources and in many user-frienfly tasks.

MUMPS language does not contain builtin regular expressions. Nearest to
regular expressiona are MUMPS patterns. To extent possibilities of application
servers based on the MiniM Database Server there was implemented some system
functions:

$ZPCREM[ATCH] for matching string to regular expression

$ZPCRES[EARCH] for searching occurences in the string by regular expression

$ZPCRER[EPLACE] for replacing substring defined by regular expression

Prefix PCRE means Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. This functions are
built on the pcre library. Here are some of the benefits of regular expressions.

In many cases, programmers are also treated to a special libraries of regular
expressions. In most cases they all may be used in MiniM with regards to syntax
and $ZPCREXXX functions arguments meaning.